“It couldn’t be any simpler – yet, in truth, it couldn’t be any better”: Inside the remarkable story of the Gibson Les Paul Junior – the single-cut that changed the world

1955 Gibson Les Paul Junior: This 1955 sunburst single-cut Junior belongs to Guitarist contributor Bob Wootton and is a magnificent early example of the model.
(Image credit: Future)

It couldn’t be any simpler – yet, in truth, it couldn’t be any better. The Les Paul Junior, which was launched in the same year as Fender’s Stratocaster, was in some ways the antithesis of Fender’s svelte three-pickup rocketship.

Made for lowly students, not cutting-edge professional artists, it had but a single pickup in the old-fashioned ‘dog-ear’ shape, while its slab body was functional, rather than futuristic, and its glued-in neck evoked an earlier era of lutherie. Yet, somehow, it always was more than the sparse sum of its parts.

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Jamie Dickson

Jamie Dickson is Editor-in-Chief of Guitarist magazine, Britain's best-selling and longest-running monthly for guitar players. He started his career at the Daily Telegraph in London, where his first assignment was interviewing blue-eyed soul legend Robert Palmer, going on to become a full-time author on music, writing for benchmark references such as 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and Dorling Kindersley's How To Play Guitar Step By Step. He joined Guitarist in 2011 and since then it has been his privilege to interview everyone from B.B. King to St. Vincent for Guitarist's readers, while sharing insights into scores of historic guitars, from Rory Gallagher's '61 Strat to the first Martin D-28 ever made.